I had seen movies, of course, Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, The Omega Man, all of which could be called dystopian in their pessimistic, cautionary nature, but the potential as a storyform was still new. Nuclear war was the usual mechanism, though the viral apocalypse was already appreciated. Alvin Toffler’s seminal 1970 work Future Shock described the mental effects on society of the ever-increasing pace of change, while Rachel Carson’s 1962 classic Silent Spring had sounded the first warning bells over industrial degradation of the environment. They were not dystopian fiction, but operated in the same context as George Orwell’s ruminations.

Though it would be years before it became apparent, a cleft was developing in the genre. First, there is “dystopian” fiction, in which the message is profoundly cautionary and the potential deterioration of society is the theme – the classics such as Brave New World and 1984 fall here, and their legion of followers (Jack Sharkey’s Ultimatum in 2050 AD, and Philip E High’s The Mad Metropolis, published by Ace in the 60s, amply fit the bill). But there is also “post-apocalyptic” fiction, which is distinctly different. While it may share the concept that society has been radically altered, not by some conscious act of intellectual epiphany, but a natural cataclysm or the results of the darker side of human nature – malice or plain stupidity – the genre is essentially adventure in nature, and the apocalypse is the mechanism by which the structure, norms and laws of extant society are dismissed, freeing the writer to invent at will. Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley (1969) was perhaps a signpost on this divergence, while by no means the first stirring.

Is post-apocalyptic fiction a lazy artform? Perhaps – but only if pursued cynically. I would place Burroughs’ 1915 novel Beyond Thirty (published in later years as The Lost Continent) in this group, as he conceived the First World War continuing until civilisation itself was extinguished in the old world, opening the door to explorers from the other side of the Atlantic, centuries later, encountering a raw and dangerous land of mystery. Adventure, yes, but of the sincerest intent. But the genre certainly lends itself to pulp and hack writing, such as the long-lived (125 novels) Gold Eagle series Deathlands created in 1986 by Christopher Lowder under the pen name of Jack Adrian. Stories of this ilk are concerned solely with raw and bloody action and how depraved the bad guy can be. Any notion of an intellectual purpose implying avoidant action in the present day is lost, indeed the terrifying futurescape has become desirable, the ruins of the present become the exotic setting of tomorrow against which essentially timeless conflicts are played out – the protagonists could as easily be gunslingers, Indians and cattle barons, their motives and actions would be no different.

Has the true dystopian story been lost in the post-apocalyptic avalanche?  Not necessarily: Peter Beere’s 1984-85 Trauma 2020 trilogy was high-end pulp, written with a very British self-denigrating prose style that sought any skerrick of black humour that could be wrung from appalling situations. Perhaps, following the already-established tradition of 2000AD and Judge Dredd, finding the funny side of the gradual dissolution of the present into a bizarre future in which the individual is very much the prey of the system, Beere sought to normalise, thirty-five years ago, the sort of social collapse British society has actually undergone in the last ten. Anti-homeless spikes in dry alcoves? I doubt if any writer was cynical enough to actually imagine such a thing, and this time reality beat fiction to the punch.

A recent meme on Facebook contrasted two images – a soaring futuristic city, imbedded in natural forest, against a crystal blue sky symbolising positive aspirations for a technological tomorrow, while the second image was a raw industrialised cityscape half-seen through a haze of pollution, devoid of green. The latter has replaced the former as the popular expectation of the future, brutally underlining the failure of current society. Homelessness is one of the maladies of the present, along with drug dependence, poverty, crime, hunger, despondency, the fostering of stupidity and dependence on leaders. The last few decades have inscribed them in the consciousness of the age, along with mass shootings, sectarian violence and racism. These things used to be the extreme stuff of dystopian fiction, the ills of the present run forward and magnified to make them obvious in a terrible literary reductio ad absurdum. Well, the future is here and the social warnings were correct – and, sadly, ultimately irrelevant because they seem to have headed off nothing at all.

They’re big, they’re tough, and they’re the sort that never question. They know they’re in the right, and all power flows through them. They killed my brother, like they killed more than anyone can count, and more every day. They hunt our sort, we’re less than vermin to the guys up in the light, which is why we have to learn how to deal with them. Them and the Foilwraps.

We call them Dickheads because of the shape of their helmets, seen from behind. That’s just what they look like. Somebody noticed about thirty years ago, and the name stuck. It really suits them.

The day is hot, but it’s always hot in the city. Filthy brick and concrete soar away above us, making canyons the sun pours into like molten lead, and the air con systems that make buildings habitable, all over the outside of old towers, are a mockery to those who have never benefitted from them. This is the low end of town, these are the ruins, the failed projects, abandoned when society changed its mind, decided we didn’t matter. The Great Change, we sometimes call it, though none of us was born then. Sweat sticks to my back under my dirty, threadbare clothes, as I hang around the corner of an alley and a yard where trash rots in the heat. Jenna, my closest friend, is on the other side, while Emilio and Big Dan are pretending to be bums, lying among trash and empty bottles. They’ll move when the time is right. It’s all a trap, see?

They say when our parents were our age, there were cool days still, and the rain didn’t burn you. There were all kinds of rights, and people had hope for the future, even ways to stop being so poor. Of course, there were lots more people in the world then, they say overpopulation was the cause of it all, too many people trying to live too big. I don’t understand that, nobody lives bigger than the ones up in the light right now, and they breed hard. But the Dickheads have sure cut back the population down deep.

Jenna can see along the alley, she flashes me a smile, all white teeth in her dirty face, surrounded with a halo of dreads, then she looks away, as if uninterested. That’s the signal. They’re coming, and we want them right here; we know there’s an APC out of sight around the corner at the end of the alley with backup ready to move. It’s the backup we want. Ten seconds later a blur of figures go by, Johnny and Sarah, doing what they do best, they run like the wind. They don’t need to commit a crime, any teen running is a target, and they take their lives in their hands because bullets are the first resort, not the last. A quick burst of fire thuds in the air as they disappear around a corner into a yard further on where we know there’s a broken cellar window giving them their way out.

At the nearest CCTV covering the alley, others of our kind are waiting, and when the troopers in their black combat suits have gone by, balls of mud are flung at the cam cover dome, enough to mean there will be no identifying images. The moment coverage is cut the squad deploy the Foilwrap–their combat robot–to follow the troopers, and that’s our cue. The machine is eight feet tall, weighs 400 pounds, it’s a black, armored killing machine that comes pounding up the alley on massive hydraulic legs, its steps making the ground shake, but it has weak spots we’ve learned to exploit. There’s a wonderful irony in turning the enemy’s machines against them, and as the robot goes by me I whirl up double bolos on their braided steel cable and cast them low, to wrap around the pumping legs and bring the metal beast down.

It’ll be up in seconds, of course, and this is the crucial moment. Big Dan is the striker of the team, he’s big as an ox and needs to be for the role he plays. He moves in a blur, shifts his filthy rags and grabs up his trademark sledgehammer, steps in and brings it down on the robot’s angular head. It’s like stunning steers in an old-time kill factory, only he keeps pounding it, like an anvil, the sun glistening on the sweat of his dark brow, until the robot’s gyros trip and the main comp goes into reset mode. Then Emilio steps in with a six-foot steel prybar that goes into the access slot at the back of the head and springs the casing. A stolen tool goes in and unlatches a locking shackle, then the prybar levers the head clear in a smooth glide. Power and data connections part at twist-locks, and the head goes into a lead-foil-lined sack, the whole thing practiced endlessly and taking no more than ten seconds.

The troopers have already penetrated the next floor down after Johnny and Sarah, it takes them nearly thirty seconds to get back out when the APC recalls them to check the robot, and by then we’re all gone. Cross-alleys, basements, walkways leading down into the cool darkness where people hide from the day… We know them all. We have to–local knowledge, how and where to go to ground, is the only edge we have.

—✤—

Old Sally is the keeper of the memories.

She knows things, remembers stuff from generations ago. We’re not sure how old she is, she says she’s near-on seventy but that’s hard to believe. She lives where they can’t find her, she hasn’t seen the sun in years. In the fifth sub-basement of the ruined tower above–it was torched in the famine riots in ’43 and left to rot, now only we rats live in it–Sally has a nice place, she squared away a whole apartment down in the dark; she pirated city electricity, and folks come to her for healing and advice.

She was an engineer when she was young, she says, that’s how she knows how to do stuff. She has computers–laptops, piles of them, she takes parts from some to keep others working. We scavenge for her, bring her everything that might be of use. Tablets, widescreens, all manner of electrojunk. It’s magic to us and she’s the magician. We can’t use them much, but the old info is in them. Discs and stuff–since they closed the libraries and book shops went out of business nobody’s seen a real book in many years. Oh, there are private collections, but they’re frowned on. Word is they’re impounded from time to time as “contrary to the public interest,” and burned.

The old tunnels are booby-trapped. We have them rigged to cave in if the wrong pairs of feet come down here. We know what to step over and what to press to keep it all up. Corridors old as the city, service tunnels for wiring a hundred years out of date, sewers and water mains, a forest of pipe and cable that used to support all the life above; now we use it, it hides us in the welcoming darkness of the earth.

Guards watch the way, pass us through, all dozen of us that sprang the trap, and an hour after we took the head we’re through the last locked doors into Sally’s world. It’s a scatter of parts and gear, tools and manuals, the scrapyard from hell, or heaven, as she’d say. She’s waiting at the door of the prefab partitions that mark her workshop, her wide girth and straggling silver hair marking her as surely as her leather apron and tool belt. She mends things, keeps this cocoon working, grows herbs under daylight LEDs to make medicine, grows food… She says the guys up in the light would call her public enemy number one, and that’s fine with us. If we’re street pirates, she’s the pirate queen, and the thought makes her laugh, crinkling her old eyes.

Big Dan presents her the lead-sheathed sack and she beams a great smile. “Well done,” she muses, her voice grating and rough with congestion. “This is the last piece of the puzzle, kids.” She takes us into the workshop and prepares leads from a special terminal, brings a program online and, very quickly, opens the sack, inserting the leads in the open cranium. The terminal screen shows a negotiation as one CPU talks to the other, and she rattles keys. In moments, the disembodied low-level AI in the robot accepts command input and is taken offline, shut down to idling behind its own firewalls. Now it’s safe to remove the head from the shielding, it can no longer call out or interfere with tech around it.

Sally opens a toolkit and soon takes the head apart. She physically isolates the computer by destroying its integral transmitter, then systematically butchers it, ransacks the unit for parts, circuit boards and memory, peripheral chips of all kinds. “Treasure trove,” she muses as she works, snapping units into place on a rig on a work table, soldering iron flying in her stiff old fingers. “You kids out-did yourselves this time.”

“Will it work?” Jenna asks softly, her young-old features lit in ghostly blues from the screen.

“It’ll work,” Old Sally says with a confident wink. “We’ve waited a long time for this.” She grins at us as she works. “That’s the secret with the world they built. It was too complex to destroy, too big, wide and deep. Everything was recorded redundantly, millions, billions of times. They’d like us to forget there was ever a world before the one they set up, they’re waiting for we who remember to just pass on, so they can tell you kids it was always as it is. But it wasn’t, and I’m going to show you.” We all hang close, staring at the incomprehensible maze of parts as she assembles them, and for the hundredth time I feel the urge to ask her to teach me how to do this. At last she’s done and runs a circuit-tester over one thing after another, nodding her satisfaction. “Cross fingers and touch wood, kids,” she whispers as she opens a plastic sleeve and brings out a silvery disc, drops it into a tray that retracts inside a housing, and after a while things change on the screen.

A new window opens and we can just read the big letters. Encyclopaedia Britannica–whatever that means. “This is the Britannica for 2028, the very last one ever made,” Sally whispers, and pulls up the master menu. “It’s all in here, half the important facts in the world… I know you don’t read well enough to just skim through it, but I can and I’ll read it to you. And I’ll teach you to read better so you can soak up everything here.” She was speaking softly, almost like a prayer, or a promise, a hope.

Keys crackle, the disc spins, and a pane of images appears. We gasp at the colors, and she pulls up one picture after another. Green forests, blue oceans, a clean sky, a beauty so deep and special its absence from the world is a pain inside us. In that moment each of us knows, more clearly than ever before, that the world they swept away will never be lost, we will resist their fictional realities to our last breaths, and work in whatever way providence allows us, to find a way back to the beautiful world that burned along with tolerance, compassion and common sense.

I smile thinly as Jenna comes to lean close against me, inviting a hug as we stare at the screen, and I lift a finger, posing a thought. “Sally, would a whole robot be of any use? It might take us a few jobs but we can probably get it down here. You’d need to put it back together, of course…”  Imagine that, a Foilwrap that fights for us…

Sally grins like I never saw her grin before. The others laugh at my audacity, and, just for a moment, it feels like we have a purpose beyond surviving.

We made our own world, the way lepers used to, but we had to accept the necessity first and even now most of us question why we ever needed to. “Human nature” is not a good answer, but it’s a damning one.

I stir sugar into coffee as I look out from the diner across the compound to the security of walls topped with wire, and try to remember how the world was before. I may not have long to live and if I’m to die I’d like it to be with a clear impression of why.

It all started with the Europa sample return. The world was jubilant to find life in the ocean under the ice, we suddenly knew we weren’t alone in the universe, we could afford to relax from our paranoia. The odds now favored life being widespread throughout the stars, and we could start to approach the future on those terms. With interstellar missions becoming a practical prospect for the next century, we had to think bigger, try to separate our future as a space-faring people from the wreckage we made of our homeworld in the process, and resolve to do better.

But all it took was one bit of alien genetic material escaping from isolation to change everything, at least for some, and having worked at those laboratories I know what I’m talking about better than most. If it had affected everyone equally there would have been no division of society, but genetics are random and diverse, and only people with certain characteristics, this blood type, that preponderance, those dominant or recessive alleles, could accept the lock-in of alien-coded proteins. In and of itself, it was hardly an invasion, and the condition is by no means life-threatening or even painful, but oh, what a difference a simple mutation can make.

I let my eyes go to my reflection in the window and smile sadly.

Stripers, they call us. After all, there has to be a name for everyone who diverges from normal, it reinforces the ‘us-and-them’ mentality characteristic of the human animal. That’s why we call the unaffected ones norms, a kind of passive retaliation. It began within weeks of the unnoticed escape of the alien proteins, the first change of the skin, and over a few more it matured into, essentially, a birthmark, a rich stripe varying in tone with the individual’s natural pigmentation.

Down the middle of the face.

Two-tones, halfy-halfies, cut-on-the-dotteds, they came up with lots of names for us. In the early days people used foundation makeup to hide it, but that was not going to work forever as a way to keep a secret, and we live in a culture, at least in the west, where masks are social taboo. To cover your face would be to admit what was concealed. The beautiful irony was, this alien junk protein had no respect for borders, boundaries, religion or politics. It struck throughout the community in the same proportions everywhere. The most polarized interest groups were lumped together, suddenly stripers and norms had become the overriding moiety defining the human race. Naturally, norms began murdering stripers as mutants, defective and to be put down before we “mongrelized the breed.” The law was in a difficult situation, as police officers, judges, prison guards and social workers were not exempt the touch of the alien.

The simple fact the effect manifested in all races, cultures and creeds underlined our unity as one species, something of which many did not want to be reminded. Tough, when the Europa bug comes calling privilege is meaningless, only the happenstance of your genetic combination carries any weight.

My smile is bitter, ironic–even now nature’s scorn for the petty imperatives of human division is enough to make one burst out laughing. I sip my coffee, enjoying it to the full. I can’t dismiss the notion it may be my last; for the problem is ongoing and resentment, blame, runs deep.

Massive efforts were put into a molecular fix, and they’re still trying, but nobody expects the resulting therapy to be dished out evenly. That’s where privilege comes in–a striper’s money is as good as a norm’s, if he can afford it. For your ordinary striper-in-the-street who might never afford it and whose insurance was not meant to cover alien infections, the cure might as well be prayer. You can bet this lead to civic unrest, a fair few clinics felt the torch and you had to wonder how many black-suited riot troopers putting it all down with gun, baton and water canon had stripes behind their gas masks. And how they felt about following orders.

Eventually, as the cure, the affordable, available-to-all correction of our alien mark, was pushed off into some future la-la-land of other administrations, ifs and maybes, stripers began to flock together. Striper-friendly apartment blocks, schools, clinics, churches, mosques, shopping centres, all began to spring up. Many were burned, some rebuilt. Walls went up around them, but the difference from other proposed walls was we built them for our own defence. That was our barbed wire, our searchlights, our armoured cars after dark. Hoo-rah, striper’s gotta do what a striper’s gotta do, and that’s survive the norms. Suddenly we were proud to call ourselves stripers, we owned the term, every day was Striper Pride Day. We had Christian stripers and Muslim stripers, aetheistic, gay and straight, black, white and everything in between, fat ones, thin ones, tall and short. Being striped brought us together and we found strength in unity. Of course, there were those who hanged themselves rather than kibitz with the others they had hated since grade school, and that was to be expected as well.

We expected a Striper Registration Act but it was a formality, with such a mark it’s hard to hide. We took to traveling in groups for safety but they passed a law forbidding more than three stripers in one place at the same time, as more constituted “provocative assembly” and earned arrest. Suddenly all the ills of society were stripers’ fault, but the one ray of hope was the number of politicians who hid behind makeup and did what they could for us.

It seemed the world was only looking for something new to tear itself apart over, and this minor mutation was the spark that touched off an inferno. It reordered society in a thousand ways, destroyed families, changed the flow of capital, built new allegiances. What towering irony, the discovery of extraterrestrial life on one hand had brought the human species together, then split it down the middle as surely as firewood before the axe. The problems faced by minorities were suddenly shared by every community everywhere, and people in general took it badly.

At length my friend Marty joins me. He’s a tough ex-trucker, now he’s a wall guard who keeps us safe. I was afraid to meet, I’ve known for a while he saw the old employment registers, knows I was a scientist at the exo labs. If resent runs deep enough he’d be the one to blow me away, and I could hardly blame him. I can’t be certain I wasn’t responsible; I handled the specimens. Did protocols fail or was it human error? No one knows, and attempts to pin blame serve no purpose. We chat, he orders coffee, I sense something unsaid between his words, and I quietly shit bricks waiting. He must know my fear, and I wonder if the man I know will prove harder or more resilient? We speak of the early days, how it got started, and seem to be dancing around the edges of something neither of us wants to say. Instead we speculate about the future, and seem to share common hopes.

You see, if there’s a happy ending in sight it’s that striper scientists are working on the cure and if we find it first we’ll have the say in how it’s delivered. There’ll be no fortunes made, and that alone makes us targets as Big Pharma treated the naevus as its dream disease, half the human race in need of therapy–when they had mined every cent they could from the top of the market down. Or maybe … we won’t treat it. Maybe we’re proud of the people we’ve become and wear our significator without shame. Not lepers but marked all the same, with a badge that says we overcame, we were strong, we made a society despite all they could do.

And that’s really as much as anyone can boast, to overcome, to survive. Maybe if alien intelligence came to Earth tomorrow we could look them in the eye and say proudly, we rose above all our fellow human beings could throw at us and it makes us just that tiny bit special.

For me it’s doubly important, for, even many years on, I have never forgotten those first days, when the Europa samples came back. Marty is right to suspect. I’ve wondered a million times if any carelessness of my own let them escape. If so, I have paid in full, I believe, with many an instalment left to make, and will never stop paying til the day I die. But I’ll go proud, a striper to the end, and if anyone were to ask me if I had any regrets, I’d say no.

In the end Marty drains his mug and pulls his cap on, heads out into the harsh sun of day, and I breathe a shaky sigh. Hard as he is, he was resilient today–able to absorb the possibility without breaking. I get to live some more.

I sigh and stare into my almost-empty mug. I’ve done what I had to, as we all have. It’s a strange thing to realize, but at the end of the day, a leper is not the worst thing you can be.

The number 25 has had meaning for me my whole life through, not that I’ve ever understood its cosmic significance, or if there is one. It’s just there, following me all my days. My dad used to tell me not to go north of 25, that was no-man’s land, and crossing the highway was dangerous. A long blacktop as far as the eye could see both ways, commuters went through faster than short legs could get from one side to the other. One time I crossed over, wandered in the reaped fields over that side, and it was like forbidden fruit, and oddly enough the price was 25 licks. I didn’t do it again for a long time.

We had 25 vehicles out in the sheds and an overdraft with Colonial Credit PLC that never seemed to dip below twenty-five grand. My alarm was on for 5.25 every morning. By 14 I was a damn good reaper driver and could bring in the einkorn from the back paddock in just under twenty-five minutes–every year, the same figure. I wondered where I would be when I was 25.

Things started to go bad on Gagarin’s when I was a kid. This was before the war, when the wrong sort of government got in. Other colonies out there started looking down their noses at us, like we were the skanky sister of the Great Human Adventure. Maybe they were right. But the capital, New London, was as grand a city as you’d ever want to see, the shipyards were booming on military contracts even before the Sendaaki attack–something many found highly suspicious, as if those responsible for the human military build-up kinda knew something the rest of us didn’t. At street level it was a home like any other, we accepted surveillance as the price of stability.

All this was happening back in the 25th century, of course, those troubled last decades. You just lived through them, they rolled off you as normality. By the time I was an older teen I had self-image to think about, spent 2500 creds on a bush-beater aircar as old as my dad and got into trouble all over the region. Never made it to twenty-five brushes with the law but they did take that many points off my licence. I hit the gym, of course, as one does, I remember my instructor giving me cardio on the stationaries and telling me to just keep the speedo north of twenty-five for an hour as a good place to start.

The number has never quit all my days through. My first apartment was in the block at 25 Lakeshore Drive, a cheap slum with a grand name, for workers at the shipyards where I had my first apprenticeship as a drone controller. I couldn’t help noticing I had 25 mech-units on my roster. I was good at it, and between working out and running construction droids I was gaining an identity.

When the war came they announced the formation of a Marine division on Gagarin’s, and, being young and stupid, I put my hand up. The hardest thing I ever did and I wished a thousand times–not twenty-five–that I’d had more sense, but I got the hang of it eventually. The unit was arbitrarily allotted the number … you guessed it, 25th Marine Division. There I was, Private Joel Haddon, with the gold ‘25’ on my shoulder, wearing it like the ironic brand of my life. I was away a long time, I saw action in the festering battles of the Acrasius Sector, I was in the jungles of B-6 for a while. In fact I did two tours, which, including transit time, was a total of 25 months active.

I got email and vids from home, of course, everyone did, but the censors were pretty strict. I knew something was wrong on the farm; dad had been drafted into industrial service, mom and the girls were running the place and hoping agriculture didn’t lose its limited status of ‘protected occupation’ before the end of things. Money was tough and the government was not helping, which meant all sorts of greasy middle men came out from under rocks with offers of loans. A quick twenty-five grand looked attractive. I told them to resist the impulse as long as they could, but I knew a day would come when they had to take out a loan to cover debts. I couldn’t send home enough to make a difference, and when the war was done my regiment demobilized twenty-five lightyears away, a cost-saving measure on the part of the aligned governments of the Middle Stars. It took me months to get back, I worked any job I could find to raise the price of an economy liner ticket; I held onto the military gratuity, never spent a red cent, the family needed it but by then we’d lost touch.

I got back on my twenty-fifth birthday. The farm was sold, some national combine had it, and the family was in a work shanty outside the capital. Of course, with the end of hostilities all Fleet contracts were cancelled, ships were going into storage at a high-orbital parking zone to await the next call to arms, and floods of ex-servicemen and women were straggling home, looking for work. The economy was in shreds and the black market was booming. Twice I was offered jobs as an arm-twister for the wrong sort, and actually considered taking them–until I discovered the identity of the loanshark who ran my family out of our home and handed it to the big guys. Then I was only interested in payback. I had a word with other veterans, did some favors I’m not proud of, picked up intel and a decent weapon, and one night paid a visit. How many rounds did I use settling the account? Bet your last credit, it was north of twenty-five.

I might do as many years if they ever catch me; but there are careers for those with the skills out there to be found, and I’m working a passage to the frontier where new colonies are coming. It’s the 26th century now, and the date no longer mocks me. I don’t know what I’ll find but I’ll bring my family out here if I can win my fortune.

Twenty-five million would be nice; with rejuvenative biotech I have centuries in which to work, scheme and try, but supposing I live to be a thousand, I’ll never forget that farm I called home, far away on Gagarin’s, by the blacktop they called Route 25.

THE END